Loren Schuster (left), managing director of Google Singapore started the day by recounting a one-month trip he and his wife made while he was in between jobs, on his way to joining the company whose recruitment process, we were told, is as rigorous as climbing Mt Kilimanjaro (I made the mountain bit up).

Firstly, he did the planning. His wife said he had the time. “My goal was not to talk to anyone and do everything online.”

Secondly, while they both agreed they wanted activities – hiking and yoga, his wife stipulated she wanted an art retreat and so he had to build a holiday around that, hence the allusion to “keeping the wife happy” and “a happy wife is a happy life”.

After much dreaming and searching, he found an art retreat in Portugal around which he then planned hiking, walking and biking activities, and he discovered a yoga cruise.

For flights, he looked at various OTAs, then booked directly on TAP and found the fares cheaper. For hotels in Istanbul, he again looked at various OTAs, went to hotel sites to compare prices, read reviews on TripAdvisor for “non-official validation”. He booked one hotel on Agoda and the other direct, based on price. For the art retreat, he paid through Paypal.

During the holiday, he used TripAdvisor to find restaurants and found one with famous egg tarts. He became a fan of the yoga cruise Facebook page, got updates and connected with like-minded travellers before the cruise.

In Istanbul, it being a big city, he relied on the iPad and smartphone to get around and walked everywhere, using Google Maps.

Post-trip, he shared his photos with friends. He received a feedback form from a hotel. There was no incentive, no sharing, it was only for the hotel’s use and so he didn’t bother to respond. Agoda, in contrast, offered incentives and would make it available to other travellers and he responded to that.

Schuster was demonstrating how the booking of travel had changed. Before, it was linear. Nothing’s really changed from a human perspective, he said. We dream, plan, book, experience and share – however the tools have changed and made it less linear and “given consumers so much more control to plan the perfect journey using official and non-official validation”.

What Google wanted to do was to give consumers the right tools to make the right choices.

Rob Torres, industry director overseeing travel, who was on his first trip to Singapore said Google was interested in travel because it has big challenges, it’s a big market, it’s complicated, it’s data centric and it’s global.

The average person clicks 18 times when searching for travel. “‘How do we make it easier for people to travel?”

Search has become more relevant and intense. Sharing data, he said, 80% of search queries include travel, 20% are for “queries never seen before”, 1 in 4 search from the bathroom and there’s a 20% growth in travel queries in Asia. Over 15% of queries come through mobile with some markets in Asia, up to 30%.

Google Hotel Finder allows users to do comparative shopping on one page. Its flight search product Google ITA launched into international markets last week, but only for flights ex-US at the moment. “We will expand,” said Torres.

Social was happening at all five stages of the travel cycle – dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, sharing. Citing a Google survey, he said 92% of Chinese use social media to plan travel compared with 77% of British.

The Google Plus 1 recommendation, layered under search, was seeing 2-3 times higher conversions for some clients. He cited the example of Lufthansa which was asking its customers to select circles, rather than the other way round.

Ali Yilmaz, head of travel for South-east Asia, said that because Asia got seriously into the web cycle at a time when social was taking off, “people are thinking social first but search is where transactions happen”. He spoke of a client in Bangladesh who hadn’t heard of Google Adwords but was doing Facebook advertising.

Emphasising the value of search, he said the global gross value of search was US$780 billion in 2009 which would make it the 16th largest economy in the world. It’s 1.2% of GDP to the USA and “bigger than travel”.

But because search has become a commodity, he said we had forgotten its importance. Remember, he said, 86% of travel starts with a search.

And a wife’s desires?